This page is a collection of notes I made on using a Wordpress site for a teaching portfolio.
What is Wordpress?
Wordpress is the name of some very popular blogging software. Lots of blogs use Wordpress to manage their posts, menus, and other features. Check out http://wordpress.com for more information.
Why use Wordpress for my portfolio?
I think there are at least two reasons why you might want to use Wordpress for your portfolio:
1. There are free sites that will host a Wordpress blog for you, making it very easy to get started, and
2. It is a highly customisable and actively developed piece of software so it has lots of great features and is easy to use.
Note that with 2, you may not benefit from all these features if you use a hosted solution as you may have limited control over the Wordpress installation. For instance, if you use wordpress.com, they will charge you $30/year to activate their "Custom Design" feature that will allow you to alter the styles (e.g. fonts) on your site. You can still make many customisations by altering your theme but it will be more limited. An alternative would be to host your own domain and then you can install Wordpress on your own site and typically have much more control. This will typically cost you a bit more - as a couple of examples, you could set this up at VentraIP for about $100/year (I use Ventra myself), or at Hostpapa for even less.
Tips for a Wordpress based portfolio
You can get a Wordpress blog for free from wordpress.com. Once you have a blog set up, you probably want to set up your portfolio as a set of Pages on the site. These are different from Posts. Posts are the normal type of blog content, they are time stamped articles. Pages are static content that on a blog might normally just be things like the "About" page. I think Pages suit portfolio content much better than Posts. You can read more about the difference in this short post about posts vs pages.
More on posts vs pages
I think perhaps a hybrid approach might be successful, and once I've explored it a bit more I will come back and provide some more information.
Controlling the order of pages in your menus
It is pretty easy to control the way your top level menu is laid out. Firstly, if you create pages, your main menu (the dropdown menu in a line across the underneath of your banner image) will be automatically created as your pages are created - no widgets or other customisation is necessary with the current default Twenty-Eleven theme. If you want to fine tune the menus, there are two main controls:
The hierarchy of pages controlled by the Parent dropdown in the Page Attributes box on the right when you are editing a page, and
The Order of the page in the same Page Attributes box - you can use this to override when the default alphabetical order isn't what you want.
Once you have your main hierarchy established, I found that one catch is that every Page seems to be placed into a menu by default. To create pages that don't appear in the menus, the easiest way is to install a special plugin (there are lots of plugins for Wordpress to enhance it's capabilities). A simple alternative is just to put your content within the existing pages, so you're not creating new pages which will pop up in your menu scheme - it's really up to you.
Jazz it up!
Along the way I have thought it would be fun to make the site even more snazzy. For instance, a sliding banner would be pretty groovy. There are a lot of these, available as Wordpress widgets, some cost money (often around $20) but there are also free versions. Here are some examples that look good:
WOW Slider (lots of different available transitions, and free for non-commercial use)
Useful resources
Here are some links that I think contain useful information if you want to go further, or read more about my notes here.
What is Wordpress?
Wordpress is the name of some very popular blogging software. Lots of blogs use Wordpress to manage their posts, menus, and other features. Check out http://wordpress.com for more information.Why use Wordpress for my portfolio?
I think there are at least two reasons why you might want to use Wordpress for your portfolio:1. There are free sites that will host a Wordpress blog for you, making it very easy to get started, and
2. It is a highly customisable and actively developed piece of software so it has lots of great features and is easy to use.
Note that with 2, you may not benefit from all these features if you use a hosted solution as you may have limited control over the Wordpress installation. For instance, if you use wordpress.com, they will charge you $30/year to activate their "Custom Design" feature that will allow you to alter the styles (e.g. fonts) on your site. You can still make many customisations by altering your theme but it will be more limited. An alternative would be to host your own domain and then you can install Wordpress on your own site and typically have much more control. This will typically cost you a bit more - as a couple of examples, you could set this up at VentraIP for about $100/year (I use Ventra myself), or at Hostpapa for even less.
Tips for a Wordpress based portfolio
You can get a Wordpress blog for free from wordpress.com. Once you have a blog set up, you probably want to set up your portfolio as a set of Pages on the site. These are different from Posts. Posts are the normal type of blog content, they are time stamped articles. Pages are static content that on a blog might normally just be things like the "About" page. I think Pages suit portfolio content much better than Posts. You can read more about the difference in this short post about posts vs pages.More on posts vs pages
I think perhaps a hybrid approach might be successful, and once I've explored it a bit more I will come back and provide some more information.Controlling the order of pages in your menus
It is pretty easy to control the way your top level menu is laid out. Firstly, if you create pages, your main menu (the dropdown menu in a line across the underneath of your banner image) will be automatically created as your pages are created - no widgets or other customisation is necessary with the current default Twenty-Eleven theme. If you want to fine tune the menus, there are two main controls:- The hierarchy of pages controlled by the Parent dropdown in the Page Attributes box on the right when you are editing a page, and
- The Order of the page in the same Page Attributes box - you can use this to override when the default alphabetical order isn't what you want.
Once you have your main hierarchy established, I found that one catch is that every Page seems to be placed into a menu by default. To create pages that don't appear in the menus, the easiest way is to install a special plugin (there are lots of plugins for Wordpress to enhance it's capabilities). A simple alternative is just to put your content within the existing pages, so you're not creating new pages which will pop up in your menu scheme - it's really up to you.Jazz it up!
Along the way I have thought it would be fun to make the site even more snazzy. For instance, a sliding banner would be pretty groovy. There are a lot of these, available as Wordpress widgets, some cost money (often around $20) but there are also free versions. Here are some examples that look good:Useful resources
Here are some links that I think contain useful information if you want to go further, or read more about my notes here.